Building the Realtime User Experience

Prerequisites

This book assumes the reader is comfortable with most aspects of web development. The example code in this text uses Java, JavaScript, PHP, and Python. You are encouraged to use the technologies that make the most sense to you. If you’re more comfortable with PostgreSQL than MySQL, please use what you’re more familiar with. Many of the command-line examples assume you’re using something Unix-like (Mac OS X, Linux, etc.), but most of this software runs on Windows, and I’m confident that you can translate any commands listed so that they work in your environment.

Building a realtime user experience is language agnostic, and in this book, I’ve chosen to use several different languages in the examples. Some examples use several technologies chained together. If you’re not familiar with one language, don’t worry about it. Much of the code is written so you can read it if you’re familiar with basic programming practices, plus I’ve done my best to explain it in the text.

Another prerequisite for this book is a Google account. Several of the examples require a Google account for App Engine, whereas others use it for authentication. Where it’s used for authentication, you could fairly easily drop in authentication from another third-party site.

Python

Python is the most-used language in this book for a couple of reasons. Whether or not you know Python, it’s a very simple language to read on the page. It also has a couple of terrific libraries that are used throughout this book. ...